The Role of Cognitive Coherence in Reference Resolution

描述（由申请人提供）：我们对物体、事件和情境之间的语义关系的感知对我们学习和推理环境的能力有着深远的影响。特别是，认识到两个事件或物体彼此相似，或者其中一个是另一个的原因或结果，对于理解世界是如何运作的至关重要。我们区分不同语义关系的能力也是语言理解的基础，越来越多的研究表明，我们推断不同事件之间存在什么关系的能力对于成功解释代词是必要的。代词（如they， she, it）在成功沟通的信息管理过程中起着核心作用，但由于其语义贫乏的性质，似乎对语言理解系统构成了挑战。最近的研究表明，一个成功的代词解释需要考虑句子之间的语义连贯关系（例如，X是Y的结果，X与Y相似）。然而，这些连贯表征的语言和认知特性还没有得到很好的理解：不知道这些表征是否特定于语言（也可能特定于代词的解释过程），或者它们是否在语言和非语言认知表征之间更为普遍和共享。此外，连贯效应如何与其他已发现的影响代词解释的因素相互作用的问题仍然是开放的。我们的长期目标是更多地了解不同的语言和视觉线索如何促进人们在事件之间感知或推断的语义关系，这些关系如何表示以及它们如何影响语言处理。本研究是实现这一目标的第一步，其重点是研究构成代词解释基础的连贯相关表征的本质。为此，我们开发了一种新的实验范式，将视觉世界眼动追踪与启动相结合。该研究有三个具体目标：(1)测试在代词解释过程中激活连贯相关表征的直接证据；(2)确定这些连贯表征的域一般程度；(3)调查代词解释是否以及在多大程度上受到语言表征的指导，特别是不能从连贯性中获得的回指依赖表征。本研究的意义不仅限于代词的解释。虽然这些实验调查了代词解释的表征，但它们构成了更广泛的研究连续体的第一步，旨在进一步了解人们如何识别和表征事件之间的语义关系。新的眼动追踪+启动范式可能为研究语言和视觉两个不同领域的因果关系和相似性提供了一种统一的方法，使我们能够通过语言和视觉研究之间的交叉施肥，从新的角度研究因果关系和相似性的感知。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our perceptions of the semantic relations that hold between objects, events and situations have far-reaching consequences for our ability to learn and reason about our environment. In particular, recognizing that two events or objects are similar to each other, or that one is a cause or a consequence of the other, is central for understanding how the world works. Our ability to distinguish different semantic relations is also fundamental for language comprehension, and a growing body of research suggests that our ability to infer what relations hold between different events is necessary for successful pronoun interpretation. Pronouns (e.g. they, she, it) play a central role in the information management process that underlies successful communication, but, due to their semantically impoverished nature, appear to pose a challenge for the language comprehension system. Recent research suggests that a successful account of pronoun interpretation needs to take into account the semantic coherence relations that hold between sentences (e.g. X is a result of Y, X is similar to Y). However, the linguistic and cognitive properties of these coherence representations are not yet well- understood: It is not known whether these representations are specific to language (and possibly specific to the pronoun interpretation process), or whether they are more domain-general and shared between language and non-linguistic cognitive representations. In addition, the question of how coherence effects interact with other factors that have been found to influence pronoun interpretation is still open. Our long-term goal is learn more about how different linguistic and visual cues contribute to the semantic relations that people perceive or infer to hold between events, how these relations are represented and how they influence language processing. The proposed research is the first step towards this goal, and focuses on investigating the nature of the coherence- related representations that underlie pronoun interpretation. To do this, we develop a novel experimental paradigm that combines visual-world eye-tracking with priming. The proposed research has 3 specific aims: (1) to test for direct evidence for coherence-related representations being activated during pronoun interpretation, (2) to determine how domain-general these coherence representations are, and (3) to investigate whether and to what extent pronoun interpretation is guided by linguistic representations, in particular anaphoric dependency representations, that cannot be derived from coherence. The significance of this research extends beyond pronoun interpretation. Although these experiments investigate the representations underlying pronoun interpretation, they constitute the first steps in a broader research continuum that aims to further our understanding of how people recognize and represent semantic relations between events. The new eye-tracking+priming paradigm potentially offers a unified way of investigating causality and similarity in two different domains, language and vision, allowing us to investigate the perception of causality and similarity in a new light by benefiting from cross-fertilization between linguistic and visual research on coherence relations. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Research on the mental representations involved in the interpretation of pronouns (she, it, they) - in particular the extent of their linguistic and cognitive generality - can potentially contribute to our understanding of the discourse-level challenges faced by second-language learners, children, and linguistically- and/or memory- impaired individuals (e.g., individuals with aphasia or Alzheimer's disease). In addition, the proposed research has the potential to bring together insights from linguistic and visuo-spatial research, thereby furthering our understanding of how humans recognize and represent semantic relations between events - an aspect of cognition that is crucial for our ability to learn and reason about our environment.